Mario is Evil? – Written by dixee on yoyogames

I just read this post on the yoyogames forums, written entirely by Dixee. All credit for that hilarious article goes to her. At first you think it’s just going to be some sort of joke, or a spam post, but no; it’s actually a well-thought out and VERY plausible criticism of the Mario series. The best time to tear apart the credibility of a beloved video game character is any time, eh? XD

Here’s a sample of what she wrote. Go to the thread to read the rest.

Of music and midterms

Lame title, I know.

Anyways, I’ve been away from this blog for a while, and I apologize. I still plan to write to it, when I get time. I’ve been preoccupied with a music project and midterms coming up.

I’ve actually got a midterm for my intro to psychotherapy class tomorrow…and it’s pretty late here. I should be getting to sleep, but hey, I can always nap just before the class (I’ve got a 3-hour break).

Anyways, on to the exciting part. For the past…some amount of time, I’ve been working on writing music to what’s looking to be a really cool megaman battle network fangame, called “Chrono X”.  There’ve been a lot of them out there that never get finished and I have to say, I was skeptical to join at first.  But then I saw the videos and downloaded the demo and I was completely on-board.

Anyways, you can find info on it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiWzSWyWX_8
(make sure to check out all 3 parts)

http://mmbnchronox.webs.com/
(official project site, including a demo!)

My music isn’t in any of the videos or the demo YET, but that’s only because I was taken on late into the project. From what I hear there’s something good in the works so just sit tight.

Well I believe you.

I just got a spam comment. Actually, it wasn’t a spam comment, as the poster himself assured me it was not. The comment was as follows:

Hello,

please check my blogs:
[link1]
[link2]
[link3]
[link4]
[link5]

this is nooooo spam! really!

Well I for one believe him. After all, anyone who tells me their comment is not spam, is definitely not posting spam. I also notice the presence of “really”, which only assures me even more. Sadly I had to delete the comment because, well, I’m not an idiot.

I replaced your homework with fruit by the foot

As some of you may or may not know, I’ve been in college for the last year. Last Monday marked the start of my sophomore year in pursuit of my psych degree. And really, whoever said your sophomore years are your hardest…seem to be dead right.

SoulHow to make an Arc Of Sight

I decided to write up a more detailed SoulHow article on my old Arc of Sight tutorial. I’ve been getting some PMs on the Game Maker Community lately asking questions about it, so I thought I’d describe it a bit better here in my blog.

Tutorial Partner file: Link

Note: This example was created for GM7, and it works in either Pro or Lite. However, if you have the Lite version, go to the constants section of the game settings in the example and set “drawrotated” to 0. That will turn off the use of draw_sprite_ext. The sprites won’t rotate as the objects move in different directions, but that’s okay because sprite rotation doesn’t have to do with what’s actually being described in the tutorial. As long as you keep the drawarc constant set to 1, you’ll still be able to easily observe the intended effect inside this example; though you can set that constant to 0 to have a more “realistic” view. Best keep it to 1, though, while you’re still learning what’s going on in each part of the code.

So in case you haven’t even seen this on the GMC, it’s a tutorial in which you will learn how to make an object test for another object inside an “arc of sight”. The first thing that probably comes to your mind is the similarity to “line of sight”. A line of sight is a line usually drawn from one object to another object to make sure nothing is in the way. For example, an enemy must shoot towards the player, but only if a wall is not between them.

There’s collision_line() for that, and collision_* for other types of shapes (rectangle, circle, etc.). But we want to use more of a circle sector shape. Essentially, an arc of sight.

SoulScroll stats to date

Seeing as how I’ve decided to revive the SoulScroll, and since I’m sitting here doing nothing on my bed after having slammed my now-aching knee into my piano bench during what could be construed as an ironic twist of fate, I thought it might be fun to take a look at our stats up until this point.

An overwhelming majority of hits have come from search engines, most notably google.  Here are the 10 most used search terms:

All done with revisions

Hey guys. Just wanted to report that I’m all done with the article revisions. Nothing major, so don’t go all the way to each of them expecting an entirely new format or article. I was considering trying to reformat some of the tutorials, but after reading them again I decided they were formatted fine as they were.

I did, however, add a “skill level” line to each tutorial in order to denote what skill level you should be at before using the tutorial. Detailed descriptions of each skill level can be found in the FAQ page. You can use any tutorial at any skill level, but what I wrote is the recommended level you should be at in order to fully understand it. Wizardry won’t help you if an article you’re reading assumes you’ve already learned something that you haven’t, so I’d recommend that you check the tutorials page and read some of the ones in the lower skill levels before moving on to the more advanced ones.

Anyways, now it’s back to writing new posts.  I hope to keep at least a moderately-steady pace.

But wait! There’s more! Comment in the next 10 minutes and you’ll get a free bottle of PURE COOKIE!

Seriously folks, I’d like you guys to drop some comments about suggestions you have for the SoulScroll. Anything that’s on your mind would be great. I want to hear what you have to say, so let me know!

The SoulScroll Lives!

Yes, I’m back in the world of blogging! However, there are a few conditions. I’ve got a number of things I’d like to go over in this post, so here we go.

First of all, further posts will be focused more towards music and general game design, rather than Game Maker itself. Since I’ve moved on from programming to music design, that’s what I’m going to be talking about for the majority of my posts. Remember, though, I said “majority”; I’ll still be writing quite a lot about stuff on the GMC, yoyogames, Game Maker in general, etc. so if you like to come here to read about that kind of thing you don’t have to worry. I’ll also probably put up a new tutorial every so often. However, music is a large part of my life, so most of the discussion will be about that; a lot of it will be about music in video games since that’s what I intend to do, so at least there’s that.

Agalag Wins Honorable Mention

The yoyogames cooperation competition results came out today. Agalag got an honorable mention, which although was marginally disappointing, was more than I’ve ever gotten in any game before. =D

So the game has been staff picked, and listed under “runners up” on the competition glog entry.
Congrats to the winners! (jumper 3 especially)

In case you forgot where to find Agalag, it’s here:

Agalag
Added: 20 August 2008
By: SoulRed12

Pre-GMC Quick Answers

Got a question?  Going to go to the GMC about it?  Well hold off for just a second.

I’ll outline what I mean here.  The reason I decided to write this article, is because I have recently been seeing many questions in the GMC novice and intermediate Q&A forums that all have a similar or exactly the same answer.

For the list of common question-answer pairs, read on.